The Weight of the Past

Looking through my pictures, I am struck by how many I took of older women.  It isn't that they are "picturesque" though of course they are, dressed all in black, following the old ways.  It is that they are so incredibly strong. If you are over 40, you knew what life was like under the Junta.  Anyone over 64 lived through the Civil War as well.  Those over 74 lived through the German occupation in addition.  If they are 92, they might have been born in Turkey and summarily sent to Greece, and then survived all the rest of that.  Those women were born in villages with outdoor toilets and no electricity that relied on donkeys for power and used their feet for transportation.  They were taught to embroider and bake bread, to stretch meat as far as it would go and to patch clothes.  They watched the 20th century ebb and flow in Greece where due to all the chaos the transition from rural to urban came all of a sudden in the 1960s and 1970s, and then watched Greece become Europe over the decade from 2002-2012.  From kerosene to cell phones. From gossip in the plateia to the internet.

Leading a donkey

Sitting at one of the bakeries

Carrying a heavy bucket

It isn't just physical burdens, either.  Every time I am in a village, I see so many of these women.  It isn't just where my eye is drawn to, either.  It is that the villages have so many more old people than young people. Now, in summer, there are more young people as my generation returns to visit their home villages.  But what about the next generation?  I worry for the villages.  Even if the grandchildren are gifted the old houses, will their increasingly European schedules allow for the weeks needed to visit the old villages of 4 grandparents? And will they feel a strong enough connection to want to?

This woman has 3 kids, one in Long Island, USA, one in the shipping business, and one in Chios.  

The burden of the past is heavy in Greece, as I have written before -- you spend your life going around the center of towns which have been cordoned off as historical zones, you can't dig a foundation without being stopped by archaeologists, you have to live up to western perceptions of the classical world -- but in that crazy century and that volcanic shift from the timeless life of the 19th century to the speed of the 21st, many people are also carrying the weight of their family's past connection to a particular village.  The bones of their ancestors mingle in the ossuary, but how do you maintain that connection while trying to live in our globalized, city-centered world?  How long can a family carry the burden of that past, too? And then what happens to the villages?  Already you can see the way that the emigrants carry the past... here is a street of the American Mestosans.

This last picture is the edge of the central communal well in Mesta.  Phil asked about the ridges at the edges of the well, which he had seen other places.  The grooves were made by the scraping of ropes heavy with the weight of buckets of water being pulled up.  The repetition has carved human experience into the stone.

These ridges in the stone were carved by ropes as people pulled heavy buckets of water up over and over and over...human muscle can cut stone with an organic fiber with enough repetition.